1 Understanding and Modeling Risk and Resilience in Complex Coastal Systems Final Report from a SURA-led Workshop held October 29 & 30, 2014 at SURA Headquarters, 1201 New York Ave. NW. Washington, DC Sponsored by the SURA Coastal and Environmental Research Committee (CERC) Chris D’Elia, Chair Workshop Steering Group: Art Cosby (MSU), Chris D’Elia (LSU, CERC Chair), Robin Ersing (USF), Scott Hagen (UCF/LSU), Jim Morris (USC), Jim Sanders (Skidaway/UGA), Carolyn Thoroughgood (UDel), Bob Weisberg (USF) SURA Coastal and IT Staff: Gary Crane, C. Reid Nichols, Liz Smith, Don Wright Contacts: [email protected], [email protected]
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Understanding and Modeling Risk and Resilience
in Complex Coastal Systems
Final Report
from a SURA-led Workshop held October 29 & 30, 2014
at SURA Headquarters, 1201 New York Ave. NW. Washington, DC
Sponsored by the
SURA Coastal and Environmental Research Committee (CERC)
Chris D’Elia, Chair
Workshop Steering Group:
Art Cosby (MSU), Chris D’Elia (LSU, CERC Chair), Robin Ersing (USF),
Scott Hagen (UCF/LSU), Jim Morris (USC), Jim Sanders (Skidaway/UGA), Carolyn
Thoroughgood (UDel), Bob Weisberg (USF)
SURA Coastal and IT Staff:
Gary Crane, C. Reid Nichols, Liz Smith, Don Wright
At its Fall Meeting in November 2013, SURA’s Coastal and Environmental
Research Committee (CERC) identified a need for a new initiative focused on facilitating
the integration of natural and social sciences in order to better assess the vulnerability and
resilience of coastal systems subject to changing threats from rising seas, increased storm
frequency and intensity, evolving societal pressures and demographics, land loss, altered
river discharge and water quality degradation. The overall goal of the proposed program
is to integrate social and natural sciences to assist planning and risk assessment of
coastal communities threatened by both long-term and event-driven (e.g., by severe
storms) inundation, land loss, water quality degradation and resulting economic
declines in industries such as tourism, fisheries and shipping. At subsequent CERC
meetings in February and March 2014 it was concluded that, as a first step in launching
this initiative, SURA should bring together a diverse community of natural and social
scientists from academia, government and NGOs to identify the priorities, science
requirements, cyber support needs and long term goals of such an initiative. To that end,
a workshop was held in Washington, D.C. on October 29 & 30, 2014. The immediate
goals of the workshop were to identify the most critical issues in assessing future risks,
vulnerabilities and resilience of complex coastal systems that involve interdependent
social, legal, biogeophysical and biogeochemical factors. The desired outcomes
included:
1. Creation of a SURA Consortium for Coastal and Environmental Resilience.
2. Establishment of a major new multiinstitutional program.
3. A competitive funding proposal by a multi- institutional team.
4. Defining and establishing a user group base that will benefit from products. The workshop agenda can be found in Appendix 1. Appendix 2 lists the workshop
attendees along with their affiliations and areas of expertise. Some unedited summary
notes from the workshop are in Appendix 3. Appendix 4 lists the responses of workshop
participants to the question: “What is one thing SURA should do next?” In what follows
in this report, we attempt to synthesize the discussions that took place and present the
conceptual foundation and tentative next steps for the new SURA initiative.
1. Introduction
The importance of including the social sciences in future environmental
forecasting programs was recently emphasized in a special issue of Oceanography
synthesizing the U.S. Globec Program (Haidvogel et al., 2013). The International
Geosphere Biosphere Programme (IGBP)1 has recently emphasized the mutual
interdependence of human (i.e., socioeconomic) and natural systems (e.g., ecosystems,
biophysical and biogeochemical systems). Social-ecological interdependence, particularly
at regional scales, is articulated by Dearing et al., (2014). In mid January 2014, the
1 IGBP, Available online. URL: http://www.igbp.net/. Accessed February 9, 2015.
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IGBP, in collaboration with the International Human Dimensions Program (IHDP), held
a workshop in Washington, DC focused on the global dynamics of the human-natural
complex system. Within its definition of “resilience” the Stockholm Resilience Centre
emphasizes the co-dependence of natural and social systems as follows: “Resilience
thinking embraces learning, diversity and above all the belief that humans and
nature are strongly coupled to the point that they should be conceived as one social-
ecological system” (see http://www.stockholmresilience.org/21/research/what-is-
resilience.html).
Rigorous study of coastal and environmental phenomena has been instrumental in
expanding the understanding of coastal and atmospheric processes leading to better
predictive tools and has also informed the development of techniques for resilient
engineering and public policies. Generally, research to develop better understandings of
physical and ecological processes has been conducted with little regard to the social,
behavioral, and economic connections. These connections are bidirectional and must be
treated accordingly. Socioeconomic research has traditionally been performed separately
by an entirely different community. Such reductionist practices are inefficient in
identifying practical solutions to real problems and diminish the relevance of research in
this important area. The need for cross-fertilization and real collaboration among
scientific communities is urgent and essential.
Social science research contributes to understanding the impact of weather and
climate events on individuals, communities and society through the study of social
vulnerability. The integration of social science knowledge further enhances natural
science models aimed at mitigating the effects of atmospheric phenomena and promoting
the adaptive capacity of human and social systems to rebound. An important goal of this
interdisciplinary collaboration is the development of strategies to enhance ecosystems
without exacerbating social vulnerability.
Considering the earth system as a whole, the IGBP has articulated the importance
of intersecting social and natural sciences and has evolved a new paradigm that considers
human and natural earth processes to be interdependent and to function and change as a
complex system. The idea of complexity is now widely accepted by modelers of dynamic
systems involving the non-linear interdependence of multiple processes (e.g., Nicolis and
Prigogine, 1989). The mathematician Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), in 1899,
originally articulated the concept of dynamical systems as systems that can be described
by coupled non-linear equations. The global coupling of societal, biogeophysical,
biogeochemical and ecological processes constitutes a prominent example of complexity.
During his keynote remarks at the SURA workshop, James Syvitski, Chair of the IGBP,
pointed out their concern with how the earth operates as a system and how humans are
changing it. The IGBP’s Future Earth project is facilitating research for global
sustainability.
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2. What is Resilience and What are its Metrics?
There was considerable discussion about how resilience is defined and measured.
With respect to the definition, there was a general consensus that we should adopt the
definition of the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), which is stated as follows:
“Resilience is the capacity of a system, be it an individual, a forest, a city or an
economy to deal with change and continue to develop” (Stockholm Resilience
Centre, 2015). In adopting this definition, it was acknowledged that there are many
other, but closely related, definitions. For example, the American Society of Civil
Engineers defines resilience as “the capability to mitigate against significant all-hazards
risks and incidents and to expeditiously recover and reconstitute critical services with
minimum damage to public safety and health, the economy, and national security.” Or,
according to a recent National Academies report on disaster resilience, (National
Academies, 2012. Disaster Resilience – A National Imperative) “Resilience is the ability
to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse
events.”
Consistent with the SRC definition, the consensus of workshop discussants was
that resilience involves the ability to adapt to constantly changing environmental,
economic, and social stressors. It does not imply constancy, stasis or resistance to change.
It is the capacity to continually change and adapt yet remain viable. According to the
Stockholm Resilience Centre, “-- there are virtually no ecosystems that are not shaped by
people and no people without the need for ecosystems and the services they provide.”
With that in mind, community resilience and ecosystem resilience should probably be
considered together, not as separate problems. Furthermore, since the built infrastructure
and related services are integral components of communities, infrastructure resilience
must be considered in relation to both communities and ecosystems. There was
considerable discussion during breakouts and plenary sessions contrasting risk vs.
resilience. It was generally agreed that low risk is not necessarily requisite for high
resilience but that risk and resilience should both be considered in planning future
mitigation strategies. Coastal risk assessment is considered in detail in a recent NRC
report (National Research Council, 2014a)
Resilience and stability are closely related. Dynamic stability does not imply
stasis. A system can be dynamically stable but we as communities often inhibit the
natural stabilizing processes and this can create vulnerability to sudden perturbations.
Humans create a dis-equilibrium, which can result in the failure of their infrastructure.
This does not result in a resilient community. Louisiana is an example of societal
enforcement of disequilibrium. For example, natural resilience of the Mississippi Delta in
the geological past involved the annual supply and re-distribution of river sediment. But
today, the impoundment of river flow by dams and the confinement of flow by levees and
jetties have substantially limited the amount of sediment that is able to nourish the
wetlands of coastal Louisiana. In New Orleans the levees have enabled land to be
developed but have also put New Orleans in an unnatural and, in the long term,
unsustainable- situation: the city is below sea level and sinking as sea level rises. The
time scale is crucial in assessing resilience. For example, strategies for increasing
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resilience at short-term or event scales (i.e., as in the case of New Orleans) can have
deleterious consequences for long-term resilience.
Agreeing on acceptable quantitative metrics of resilience proved more
problematic and remains a challenge for future deliberations. It was noted that some
metrics already exist for specific subsystems. For natural ecosystems, such as wetlands,
biodiversity is a source of enhanced resilience. Similarly, economic diversity probably
results in increased community diversity. One well-known vulnerability index considers
vulnerability to environmental hazards (Cutter, 1996). Dr. Julie Rosati of The U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers, Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) has recently
been working on the development of a coastal resilience metric that includes engineering,
environmental, and community resilience. The ERDC approach considers resilience to
involve four basic stages: preparation, resistance, recovery, and adaptation.
Some skepticism was expressed at the SURA workshop about the reliability or
relevance of some of the composite indices that attempt to combine multiple factors into
a “single number” metric of resilience. Since many of these factors are co-dependent and
the interconnections are sometimes non-linear, metrics involving simple additive
contributions are likely to be inadequate. For the future, a better approach may be to
utilize complex systems models that take account of interactions among multiple factors.
SURA can help to facilitate such an approach.
3. What are the Challenges to and Science Requirements for Advancing
Interdisciplinary Assessments of Coastal Risk and Resilience?
Workshop participants agreed with the urgency of adopting far-reaching
interdisciplinary approaches to modeling future risks and resilience of socio-eco-techno-
logical systems, as articulated by the IGBP and the SRC. The complex interdependence
among human communities, coastal ecosystems, climate, and ocean physics is accepted
as axiomatic by the vast majority of the scientific community. However, many
universities are not up to the task of true interdisciplinary research. Part of the problem
relates to the accreditation system and its discipline-specific standards. This holds
universities back from interdisciplinary work. Multi-discipline papers with many authors
are not really valued and young untenured faculty who engage in too much
interdisciplinary work may be denied tenure. The discipline-based distribution of faculty
on campuses is also a discouraging factor: social scientists and natural scientists may be
based on opposite sides of large campuses or even on different campuses of multi-
campus state universities. The need for new approaches to facilitating interdisciplinary
research and education was highlighted in a keynote presentation at the SURA Board of
Trustees meeting in Washington D.C. on November 7, 2014 by Ed Seidel, Director,
National Center for Supercomputing Applications2. Seidel referred to a recent NRC
report on “Convergence” (National Research Council, 2014b). As emphasized in this
2 National Center for Supercomputer Application, Available online. URL: http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/. Accessed February 9, 2015.
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report, “Convergence” is intended to imply integration of knowledge, tools and ways of
thinking from several disciplines. It is not simply the “patching together” of results from
one single discipline as an input to another discipline.
Centers and institutes are one way to promote the melding of disciplines and .are
not as constrained as traditional departments. They may form “tribes” of like-minded
individuals. “Enterprise” entities that promote interdisciplinary synergies but also are
designed to evolve as science and needs change may be better models. Alternatively, the
enterprise may be a Center for Research, Education and Innovation (CREI) a term
proposed by Ed Seidel in his presentation to the SURA Board of Trustees. The “CREI” or
“Enterprise” can facilitate the inclusion of industry and governmental entities along with
academics. These Enterprises would be theme based and may be virtual as opposed to
centrally located. Climate change is an example of an enterprise focus as is coastal
resilience. What disciplines do you need, and what state partners and local municipalities
and politicians? There would not be faculty spots in the enterprise. Faculty could stay in
their home departments but they could come and go and the Enterprise could “buy out”
portions of their time. The enterprise themes can change; as new needs and
understandings unfold, they would adapt. The world is likely to be very different in 2050,
as will the missions of universities that remain relevant. SURA can be the “Coastal
Resilience Enterprise” and SURA institutions as well as other institutions could
become a part of this “Enterprise”. As we explain in the next subsection, SURA
proposes the creation of a Consortium (or Collaboratorium) for Coastal and
Environmental Resilience.
Beyond obvious organizational and governance challenges, effective
interdisciplinary integration will require the convergence of an extensive and
uncommonly diverse suite of scientific, demographic, economic, legal, and cultural data
and information. As the program matures, the challenges of “big data” and its
management will necessitate the provision of sophisticated cyber services to ensure that
the information is accessible and understandable to users with a wide range of
backgrounds. SURA’s existing Coastal Ocean Modeling Testbed (COMT) has been
successful in bringing together modelers of physical processes such as coastal inundation
and continental shelf and estuarine hypoxia. These same models will be needed in future
assessments of resilience. However, while physical and ecosystem modelers are
predicting natural threats, the affected communities are also changing. The ways their
economies evolve changes the community’s risk. Changes in the age of the population
and in its cultural heritage also change the risk factors. One challenge to social scientists:
help predict what socio-economic changes are coming in the next 10-20 years. Answers
to questions such as: “How will the risk of flooding during an extreme event be
exacerbated in various sea level rise scenarios?” will depend on where people with
different vulnerabilities are living in the future.
Predictive models will necessarily underpin our ability to plan future adaptive
strategies on decadal time scales. Event-scale forecasts will likely continue to depend on
operational agencies such as the National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center
but improved tools from the non-governmental “Enterprise” can help to make those
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forecasts more reliable and relevant. At both time scales, we should expect advances to
be made progressively not only in modeling specific phenomena such as storm surges
and demographic shifts but also in linking models and model outputs in ways that
highlight feedbacks and non-linear connections. These will be complex systems models
and the modelers will very likely need access to high performance computing resources.
For all of the modeling activities, agreed upon sets of standards for the models as well as
the observational data used to assess the models will be essential. A key role for the
facilitating “Enterprise” or Consortium will not be to execute models but to provide the
virtual environment within which modelers and non-modeling scholars from different
disciplines can interconnect. Quite simply, systems science must involve bringing
together different components of the system and integrating them and SURA can help
do this.
4. What Roles Can SURA Play in Facilitating Integration and
Supporting the Science Needs for Coastal Resilience?
During her lunchtime remarks at the workshop, Margaret Davidson (NOAA)
highlighted some key roles that only a multi-institutional entity like SURA can play. A
prominent organizational example for climate modeling is that of the National Center for
Atmospheric Research and the Universities Consortium for Atmospheric Research
(NCAR/UCAR). Her assessment was that we don’t really need an “NCAR” but we need
a hub for intellectual awareness; a think tank, an intellectual community of practice.
SURA can develop standards and frameworks and enable multiple models, outputs and
visualizations. She advocated that SURA could serve as a “Collaboratorium” for Coastal
Resilience. This notion is consistent with the idea of the Coastal Resilience Enterprise (or
Coastal CREI) as articulated in breakout discussions the previous day. SURA can and
should do this. SURA’s overarching hallmark is the Science of Collaboration. In all of
the disciplines which SURA has been and expects to be involved, its prime role has been
to facilitate collaborations among numerous, geographically distributed institutions. But
SURA could do this best in partnership with other organizations such as the Consortium
for Ocean Leadership, the National Sea Grant Program, and/or local government entities.
The overall function of the proposed “Collaboratorium” would not necessarily be
to produce final answers but to provide an interdisciplinary virtual environment and set of
services to enable a broad interdisciplinary community to address a shared long-term
goal. This goal will likely evolve with time but may initially be: to integrate social and
natural sciences to assist planning and risk assessment of coastal communities
threatened by both long-term and event-driven (e.g., by severe storms) inundation, land
loss, water quality degradation and resulting economic declines in industries such as
tourism, fisheries and shipping. The SURA-based enterprise would help to determine
areas where interdisciplinary synergies can be most readily applied, facilitate the
infrastructural advances that are needed to accommodate future modeling and prepare a
research plan for moving forward as a community. The resulting research plan should
guide a community science program aimed at developing models for forecasting the key
factors that will impact coastal systems and the resilience of coastal communities over the
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next few decades and assessing how model results can improve decision-making. Some
specific target activities of the “Collaboratorium” may the foci of future workshops.
5. What Cyber Support Services Will be Needed and How can
SURA Help to Provide or Facilitate Those Services?
On the second day of the workshop, Hans-Peter Plag and Gary R. Crane
facilitated an extensive discussion focused on ideas and concepts leading to the
development of a shared information technology cyber infrastructure for distributed data-
management and community modeling. Plag pointed out the need for Virtual Research
Environments to Enable Knowledge Creation in Response to Societal Needs. He
advocated the creation of cyber-supported “playing fields” where it is easier to work with
others. The infrastructure should be able to help link societal benefits to essential
variables. There are numerous cyber tools and toolkits available to help make linkages,
provide visualization, archive and retrieve data etc. However, the community needs a
tech support network and training in how to utilize the tools. SURA could help with these
technical services. There seemed to be a general consensus (not unanimous) that a SURA
supported cyber-infrastructure to develop the playing field for developing, validating,
communicating, and generally advancing the interdisciplinary collaboration between
natural and social sciences for modeling risk and resilience in complex coastal systems
would be welcome. SURA’s cyber services should include High Performance
Computing (HPC) resources for running models, a platform for accessing, sharing and
archiving data and model outputs as well as for accessing and sharing open-source model
codes, and a catalogue of and access to analysis routines and visualization tools.
SURA can help the community to take a first step in addressing questions of risk
and resilience by facilitating the creation of a base of empirical and numerical model data
along with a rigorous set of data standards and an extensible cyber infrastructure for
managing, and accessing the necessary information. This will support a combination of
discipline-specific and cross-disciplinary numerical modeling, coupling the outputs from
physical process models with ecosystem and socioeconomic models, and statistical
analyses of socioeconomic factors that might ultimately determine the resilience of
communities to expected stressors. In addition, modeling protocols could be extended to
enable the potential impacts (positive or negative) of engineering approaches or
management decisions to be assessed. Over the course of the next few years, it is
possible for SURA to accommodate most or all of the cyber needs identified at the
workshop. By way of the ongoing COMT, SURA has had significant success in evolving
an appropriate supporting cyber infrastructure. While many of the existing cyber services
will continue to assist the physical scientists within the proposed interdisciplinary
consortium, services will need to be extended significantly to support the social scientists
and especially to support an anticipated new generation of complex systems models and
their outputs. Complexity science is highly interdisciplinary, and addresses fundamental
questions about living, adaptable, changeable systems (Janssen, 1998).
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6. Who Would be the Target Beneficiaries of a SURA Consortium
for Coastal Resilience?
Throughout the two-day workshop, a frequently repeated question was: who are
we doing this for? We must consider who will be the stakeholders and clients. There
was a broad consensus that we could not justify this undertaking just for the benefit of
university scientists. For the ongoing COMT program, the target beneficiaries have been
operational agencies (particularly NOAA) and the main product has been the transfer of
methodologies and models from research to operations. For the proposed consortium, the
potential stakeholders may include the State Sea Grant Programs, re-insurers, county
governments, state governments, health workers, emergency managers, resource
managers, FEMA, NGOs such as Nature Conservancy; educators, the general public- and
operational agencies. Although the specific needs of each of these stakeholders differ,
the universal nature of the most urgent questions should enable the consortium to focus
firstly on problems that are important to a broad range of beneficiaries. In some cases,
however, it may be necessary to concentrate on a subset of stakeholders who have a
narrow definition of “acceptable benefits” that communities actually value. Risk
reduction is one such benefit. All agreed that decision makers must have timely and
actionable information to guide their response to emergency situations.
7. The Next Steps? A Second Workshop to define a scenario and
potential region to test
As we go forward toward the creation of a Consortium for Coastal Resilience (or
similar entity) we need to have a clear focus on the nature of the connections and
methods we hope to foster. It was generally felt that, at least in the beginning, we should
not dwell too deeply on the generalities and generic scenarios. Instead, more progress
will be made if we identify one or two geographically specific cases and explore ways
that we might collaborate to address, or anticipate, future system responses to plausible
scenarios of future changes in natural and social conditions at the selected location. The
scenario might be driven in part by climate change predictions (e.g., from NCAR) and in
part by statistical projections of future demographics and economics. The aim would not
be to actually solve a problem but rather to explore how to collaborate and what
methodologies would be needed.
In this exercise, we will attempt to devise problem-focused strategies and
innovative solutions that require an integrative approach. We want the outcome to be
bigger than the sum of the parts. Innovation should be driven by integration. Ideally, we
should strive to carry out this pilot exercise in collaboration with the municipality or
county of the selected site, with representatives from the appropriate federal agencies
such as FEMA and USACOE, the state Sea Grant program, the insurance industry as well
the natural and social scientists who will be building the methodologies. Hence, it would
probably be preferable to hold the workshop at the chosen case study site. At the
invitation of Dr. Samantha Danchuk of the Environmental Planning & Community
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Resilience Division, Broward County, Florida, we are considering holding this follow up
workshop in Broward County during October, 2015. The workshop is being planned to
occur during the Spring tides following full moon on or about October 27th
beginning
with a full-day field excursion to visit sites subject to frequent inundation. A preliminary
assessment will gage the level of collaboration among social and physical scientists.
8. References Cited
Cutter, S. L. 1996. Vulnerability to environmental hazards. Progress in Human
Geography 20:529-539
Dearing, John A. , Rong Wang, Ke Zhang, James G. Dyke, Helmut Haberl, Md. Sarwar
Hossain, Peter G. Langdon, Timothy M. Lenton, Kate Raworth, Sally Brown,
Jacob Carstensen, Megan J. Cole, Sarah E. Cornell, Terence P. Dawson, C.
Patrick Doncaste, Felix Eigenbro, Martina Flörke, Elizabeth Jeffers, Anson W.
Mackay, Björn Nykvist, Guy M. Poppy. 2014. Safe and just operating spaces for
regional social-ecological systems. Global Environmental Change 28:227–238
Haidvogel, D. B., E. Turner, E. N. Curchister, and E. E. Hoffmann. 2013. Looking
Forward: Transdisciplinary Environmental Forecasting and Management.
Oceanography 26(4), 128-135
Janssen, M. 1998. “Use of Complex Adaptive Systems for Modeling Global Change.”
National Research Council, 2014b. Convergence: Facilitating Transdisciplinary
Integration of Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Engineering, and Beyond.
Washington, DC, The National Academies Press
Nicolis, G. and Prigogine, I. 1989 Exploring Complexity, New York, Freeman & Co. 313
pp
Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, “What is resilience?” Available online. URL: http://www.stockholmresilience.org/21/research/what-is-resilience.html. Accessed on February 9, 2015.
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Appendix 1. Workshop Agenda
October 28, 2014
Late Afternoon/Early Evening Arrival Dinner (no host) for those in town
October 29, 2014 (full day)
08:00 Registration and Breakfast
08:30 Welcome: Chris D’Elia, SURA Trustee & Chair, SURA Coastal and Environmental
Research Committee
08:45 Workshop Goals and Background; Introductions
Don Wright, SURA Director of Coastal and Environmental Research
09:30 Keynote Presentation – The Anthropocene and the Birth of Future Earth
James Syvitski, Chair, International Geosphere Biosphere Programme and
Executive Director, Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System, University of
Colorado at Boulder
10:15 Break
10:30 Open Discussion: Assessing the Vulnerability of Coastal Communities to Climate
and Societal Changes. Where are we? Moderator: Nancy Targett, Dean and
Professor, College of Earth, Ocean and Environment, University of Delaware
11:30 Charge to Breakout Groups, Don Wright, SURA
Identifying model criteria, science requirements and Cyber-infrastructure priorities
12:00 Lunch w/Speaker – Science Under Siege Bob Gagosian, Director, Consortium for
Ocean Leadership
13:00 Breakout Session: Identifying model criteria, science requirements and cyber-
infrastructure priorities
Theme 1-- Articulating the interconnections of socio-ecological systems and
identifying the societal, legal, biophysical and biogeochemical criteria
needed to model resilience in the four specific coastal regions. – Robert
Twilley, LA Sea Grant- Leader
Theme 2 -- Identifying the systems science requirements for future coastal
risk and resilience programs. – Bob Gagosian, COL -Leader
Theme 3 -- Creating an accessible and extensible collaborative cyber
infrastructure for cross-disciplinary communication. - Rick Devoe, South
Carolina Sea Grant Consortium -Leader
15:30 Break
15:45 Plenary to review outcomes of Breakout 1; open discussion
17:30 Wrap up for Day 1
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18:30 No-host dinner at local restaurant
October 30, 2014 (adjourn at 3 PM)
07:30 Breakfast
08:30 Motivating the Theme: Hans-Peter Plag (invited), ODU’s Mitigation and
Adaptation Research Institute
08:50 Open Discussion: Ideas and concepts leading to the development of a shared
information technology cyber infrastructure for distributed data-management
and community modeling Moderator: Gary Crane, SURA Director of Information Technology Programs
09:30 Charge to Breakout Groups, Don Wright, SURA
Defining indices of resilience
09:45 Break
10:00 Breakout Session : Defining indices of resilience
Theme 1 -- Community resilience – Tom Birkland, NCSU-Leader
Theme 2 -- Ecosystem resilience – Jim Morris, USC -Leader
modeling in rivers/ coastal areas, coastal modeling, resilient redesign,
local/ state government comprehensive planning. Interest: Miami/
Dade, infrastructure/ transportation system risk and resilience,
implementation strategies for phased climate change adaptation
Margaret Davidson NOAA Principal scientific advisor on coastal inundation science, resilience,
development, and policy at NOAA.
Denise DeLorme University of Central Florida Environmental communication through the application of qualitative
research methods
Rick DeVoe S.C. Sea Grant Consortium Research focuses on relationships between land use and land use change and ecosystem condition (including work with local governments and planning entities); coastal stormwater pond function, performance, and management; coastal ocean policy and governance at the state and regional levels, including marine planning; coastal and offshore aquaculture policy, management, and regulatory environment; and offshore energy development policy and management.
David Eggleston NC State University/CMAST Interested in metrics for coastal resilience. Teaching and research
focuses on experimental marine benthic ecology, detecting
ecological impacts, fisheries and behavioral ecology, population
dynamics and modeling, estuarine and coastal habitat restoration,